Hello! says goodbye to editor Ciara Hunt at glam TIFF party

Hello! says goodbye to editor Ciara Hunt at glam TIFF party

After leaving the Hello! soirée, Ciara Hunt headed south to the YSL after party at Victor Restaurant (Image: by George Pimentel/Getty Images)

It was a night of Hello! and goodbye at the Royal Conservatory of Music last night, when Hello! magazine’s annual TIFF to-do doubled as a send-off for editor-in-chief Ciara Hunt, who is moving to Boston on Monday. Greeting guests in a black leather-esque dress by Halston and green drop earrings (a nod to her Irish background), the Toronto scene staple explained that she and her husband just decided they needed a change. “We’ve decided we’re going to keep on moving until we realize that we love a city and we’re going to stay there,” she said. “We’ve loved Toronto. It’s changed so much in the four and a half years I’ve been here.”

Deputy editor Alison Eastwood, looking Hollywood-hot in a dramatic red-carpet-coloured gown, will take over as Hello!‘s editor-in-chief—or, as she puts it, “slide on over from the co-pilot to the pilot seat and keep on soaring. I just thought of that line, actually. I’ll have to keep on using it.”

The conservatory was sparsely decorated with a few flowers, rolled-up copies of Hello!, and celebrity photographs projected onto the wall of the hallway (eerily, John Travolta and his late son Jett greet us when we arrive). But the glass-walled space’s elegant design is hard to improve on, and the crowded room’s guests provided their share of visual stimulation.

Fifteen hundred were invited to the party, and judging from the lack of elbow room, most of them showed up. The CanCon guest list included boxer Lennox Lewis, supermodel Monika Schnarre, newlywed Seamus O’Regan, everyone who has ever had a role on Degrassi, and Caitlin Cronenberg, who tells us that she’s still as starving as she was when we spoke with her last Thursday. “This will have to do,” she sighed as she settled for a slice of blue cheese. Can someone please bring this girl a mini-burger?

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